An Empire Upon a Hill

In the spring of 1630, John Winthrop informed the plucky band of Puritans who accompanied him across the Atlantic that they were destined for great things. "Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies," Winthrop remarked in a sermon composed aboard the good ship Arabella shortly before he stepped ashore on Massachusetts Bay, "when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us."¹ Nearly 400 years later, the eyes of the world are indeed riveted upon America, but not everyone agrees that the United States has fulfilled Winthrop's prophecy in quite the way that God supposedly intended. Read in sequence, the three books currently under review show how America's muscular sense of destiny unleashed a rapacious brand of expansionism that troubled observers in every corner of the globe and how U.S. policymakers during the Cold War resorted to public relations and propaganda in an attempt to "rebrand" the United States by "selling the American way" to skeptics from Western Europe to East Asia and from Latin America to the Middle East.

Richard Kluger's Seizing Destiny provides a sweeping overview of four centuries of American territorial expansion from the European conquest of the New World after 1492 through the War of 1898. As with Simple Justice, his best-selling account of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, Kluger has given us another very readable popular history based largely on secondary sources. He wastes little time spelling out how Americans went about constructing their empire upon a hill. "Crafting their own destiny with whatever tools were at hand," Kluger writes in his preface, "they gained a continental expanse by means of daring, cunning, bullying, bluff and bluster, treachery, robbery, quick talk, double-talk, noble principles, stubborn resolve, low-down expediency, cash on the barrelhead, and, when deemed necessary, spilled blood" (pp. xii-xiii). Although the Spanish Empire in Mexico and Peru predated the first permanent English settlements in North America by nearly a century, the latecomers from the British Isles made up for lost time by satiating their lust for land with a remarkable singleness of purpose that Kluger likens to anthropologist Robert Ardrey's famous "territorial imperative." These English empire-builders relied on a cultural toolbox that was well suited for rapid conquest—a fondness for venture capitalism, a self-serving sense of racial hierarchy, and a Protestant ethic whose "driving concern was private property, not the public weal" (p. 51). In prose that often reads like Frederick Jackson Turner on steroids, Kluger presents the lure of the western frontier as the most potent historical force during the colonial era, placing John Winthrop's descendants on a collision course first with Native Americans and French fur traders and then with the royal government in London, which hoped that the Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act of 1774 would serve as immoveable objects in the face of the irresistible force of land-hungry English settlers.

The territorial imperative was also a central feature of the American Revolution, whose leaders spent the 1770s and 1780s "thinking large." Kluger emphasizes that statesmen like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were inveterate land speculators; that small states like Maryland, New Jersey, and Rhode Island repeatedly butted heads with land-rich Virginia over the fate of the trans...